Re: German loans in Polish

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Torsten" <tgpedersen@> wrote:
> > Well, obviously we have a problem here, because in neither
> > OHG missa, mëssa nor
> > Latin missa
> > is the final -a stressed. The stress has been moved in the loan
> > process.
>
> I don't see any problem with that. Either the short vowel could not
> receive the stress, or it lost the ability to hold it as it became a
> jer. There's some mention of it in
> http://tech.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/47177 ,
> but I can't find much relevant discussion.

These oldest loans are pan-Slavic, Kästner places them before Havlík's rule. According to him /i/ was replaced by /ь/ which then had the fate of other jers.

The idea that Havlík's rule triggered stress movement seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse. It works on paper, but I can't get my head around how that would have worked in practice. I would be much happier with a formulation that did it the other way round. Japanese has a similar system (as Proto-Slavic) of open syllables and loss of /i/ and /u/; how are the formulated there, is /i/ and /u/ - loss independent of stress?


Torsten